Posted February 7, 2007
- Vista failed to recognize my USB memory stick (rebooting to Kubuntu Linux I was able use it again).
- Browsing to a PDF file, Vista had no idea what to do with it–even when I saved it to the desktop and clicked on it (out of the box Kubuntu Linux opened it in the most useful PDF viewer (Kpdf) I have ever seen–referring to the awsomely efficient select tool).
- Installing previous applications, they now fail to start–some complaining of missing MSVCR71.dll, while others complain that .NET 1.1 or greater is required (!?!).
- Using Google I found the following help: “I ran into a missing msvcr71.dll while trying to use Password Safe. Since I was dual booting with XP on another partition, I copied over the file from \Windows\System32 on the XP partition. Next it was msvcp70.dll and then finally msvcp71.dll. After that the application came up fine. Soooo…if you’re missing any of these three, grab a copy of them from an XP installation and just simply drop them into \Windows\system32 in the Vista partition…” (source).
- Using WinXP to patch up Vista solved the missing dll dilema (twenty minutes later). Now I just need to figure out how Vista either managed to come out without .NET installed (can you imagine?), or how it somehow managed to hide what version it had from applications that ran comfortably on WinXP… Wow…
- The poorly rendered fonts are really beginning to bother me (Kubuntu Linux offers no such visual grief). Did I mention the blurry fonts are getting really tiresome yet?
- I installed Office 2007–Outlook is unable to connect to our Exchange server with the exact same settings I have in Outlook 2003 on my other system. Out of the box experience? Broken.
- Finally I had to give up testing for the day as my eyes couldn’t take it anymore.
- Giving my eyes a break, I rebooted to Kubuntu Linux… Whew time to be productive again…
You forgot the cost differences and the difficulty to upgrade from the previous versions of the respective operating systems ;-)
I actually setup a system with Vista today for a client and it was the most annoying thing EVER! There were so many pop-ups/alerts when I tried to install/uninstall programs and delete shortcuts. I see no reason to ever upgrade to a future version of Windows again.
It’s all very confusing to a first time user who needs to shut down/restart their computer (the power button has been turned into a sleep function).
I like the addition of “Gadgets” though. How did they ever think of something so clever?
I’m also impressed with the media center features of Vista, but we’ll see what the open source community develops in response ;-)
Hey Nick!
You think? This is good Nick. Venting is good. Breathe in… Breathe out…
Ok, with regard to the those novel gadgets however, did you every see such a nicely designed wall clock? I mean I actually left it there for awhile because it looked so nice! In the end I got rid of the whole side bar because it was taking up an inch and a half of screen real estate down the whole right side of my screen for 1.5 square inches of value?
And while I’m thinking of it, that built in RSS gadget was the first thing I thought I’d try and in the process it became the first thing to go. Why? Because it required you to use Internet Explorer to browse to where ever I happened to be browsing with Firefox at the time just so I could create the RSS feed for the gadget! Anyone care to guess how long it took me to decide I didn’t like that? ;)